What You Need to Know About Rails3

Rails 1.0 brought us a revolutionary way to think about web development. Rails 2 brought us a cleaner, stable day-to-day API for building applications in Rails. And Rails3 brings us speed, extensibility, and a richer ecosystem.

In this talk, Yehuda will walk you through some of the new features in Rails 3, including a more powerful router and a more expressive way to design web sites that serve double-duty as web services.

But the real user-facing improvements in Rails3 come from a documented and stable plugin API. You will learn the recommended ways to hook into Rails to extend existing functionality or even swap out a Rails component for one of your own without losing the integration Rails is so famous for.

You will also learn how Rails3 became ORM and JavaScript library agnostic without sacrificing the tight integration with ActiveRecord and Prototype that makes Rails such a great full-stack framework.

Some knowledge of Ruby (and Rails) would be very helpful but is not strictly required.

He spends most of his time hacking on Rails and Merb, but also on other Ruby community projects, like Rubinius and Datamapper. And when the solution doesn’t yet exist, he’ll try his hand at creating one – as such, he’s also created projects like Thor and DO.rb.